


five

by Sunie



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Depersonalization, Dissociation, Gen, M/M, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-21 00:13:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16565849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunie/pseuds/Sunie
Summary: “Peace Day really did come,” she whispers, and these are your memories.





	1. yours

**Author's Note:**

> special thanks to [heavvymetalqueen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavvymetalqueen/pseuds/heavvymetalqueen) and [kawaiibooker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kawaiibooker/pseuds/Kawaiibooker) for helping me claw my way through the innards of this fic.

You find yourself here again, standing at the threshold, bright lights washing your vision in white and darkness at your back. The door slides shut behind you, and you step forward, drawing closer to the girl sitting on the bed. She’s reading a book and humming, just a bit flat, to the crackling recording of a gently strummed guitar.

“Did I ever tell you the story behind this song?” she asks, her legs swinging under the edge of the hospital bed. Like this, framed in the pale light blooming at the edges of her small silhouette, you might be able to lie to yourself that she truly is just an angel of peace.

No, you tell her. Her eyes widen and she dives into her tale; Charlotte spinning silk of words and images and fluttering-quick thoughts. Miller had tried for days to write it, she tells you, her voice bouncing and sunny, flute-like. Ideas and blasé truths spill from her lips like a fountain overflowing and you, in your silence, catch the stories in your cupped palms. There is a comfort to the rhythm of her unending voice, how she doesn’t stop and wait for your affirmations, like she hopes to flood you in the sea of her tales as you lie on your back and ride the waves. She continues uninterrupted—before her mind flies again and she perches on another topic, flitting between memories like a hummingbird. Somehow she’s talking about Nuke now, the little black cat whose fur you sometimes can still feel between your fingers, one of a handful of phantom sensations you’re able to recall of a life before the explosion and the helicopter and the metal in your face. She tells you something about Mr Miller and no one watching and feeding the cat.

“Speaking of Miller,” she says, “why isn’t he here?” Her eyes turn to the door, blue becoming foggy grey. “Tell him to visit.”

Your skin is cold. You clasp her shoulder and make false promises to bring him next time. She nods and then, “I’m tired,” she tells you and you help her down, watching her eyes close. For a few seconds, she lies there in serenity—before it all melts away, her brows changing from lax to furrowed, her lips muttering fitfully in her sleep.

Her stomach hurts. It always does.

But in those precious moments before the nightmares set in, if you covered that scar, perhaps she hasn’t aged at all, you think.

 

* * *

 

Kaz is at his usual spot on the balcony overlooking the command platform. His coat drapes over his shoulders, an added layer to bulk his silhouette, obscuring the part of him that isn’t there. He leans on the railing, his crutch propped up next to him, and watches over his Mother Base in silence.

“Kaz.”

He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t turn—just angles his head imperceptibly. Then he nods. Curt. Businesslike. “Boss.”

You approach the railing and lean your elbows on the fence. It’s quiet during sundown; most of the men are on break eating at this hour, or even catching a quick nap. Kaz, however, never rests. He remains, ever-vigilant, at his roost, always keeping watch for potential enemy attacks.

You inhale. You wonder if words had always been this hard for you, or if the difficulty comes from the spike of shrapnel embedded in your brain. Sentences start and stop before they meet your throat; a hundred words tried and erred before you speak. Finally you settle on a sequence of syllables that seems right, and you give them voice, telling him:

“Paz keeps asking why you don’t come to visit.”

The light glints off his sunglasses. You can’t see his eyes but you know how pale they are. They were never so pale before. The stubble on his chin; his hair, greasy under the edges of his beret; his wrinkled coat and pants… he’s crumbling, you think. Held together with rage and revenge and the last remaining scraps of his dreams.

“ _Paz_?”

He breathes. His exhalations are always so rough and ragged, as if his throat is clenched tight, strangling the very air that gives him life. “You know full well why I haven’t.”

You say nothing. You know what is coming. Sometimes you wonder why you ask.

“If that _bitch_ doesn’t know anything useful then what even is the point of keeping her here? We’re putting ourselves in danger by harboring an ex-Cipher spy among us. You know I’ll always defer to you, Boss, but letting her stay here was the wrong call to make.”

He grabs his crutch and turns to face you, gripping the handle until you hear the sound of leather on rubber. “We should just throw her back into the sea and let her secrets die with her.”

“Kaz…”

He sucks in another rattling breath. His shoulders settle.

“Boss.” He sighs. “I’m sorry. But you know how I am. And you know what she did.” He turns his head to the side, looks back over his Mother Base. “The rest of them… the survivors of MSF… I have to keep quiet for them. They need something to hold on to—to martyr our Angel of Peace. I let them have that, at least. But in my heart—and in yours—you know the truth. She was with _Cipher_ , Boss. She’s a _traitor_. She—”

“ _Kaz_.”

You place your hand on his shoulder, and your faces close in. Up close, if you look hard, you can see his eyes past the frames. Pale and misty and clouded.

“That’s enough,” you whisper, and press your fingers against his skin. He shudders to a stop.

“Snake…”

You don’t say anything. There aren’t words to say. Maybe the Big Boss they always talk about would have words, but you, the Big Boss with a shard through your head, you never have anything. All you can do is listen and receive: an empty box in which people place their hearts.

The moment ends. The proximity between the two of you never lasts. One of you always pulls away before something of significance can happen. Always passing through each other’s space, but never staying long enough to be close. You wonder if your relationship with your own XO had always been like this. It’s hard to remember—Ocelot had warned you that the coma would make things foggy—but you feel like it might have been different, back then.

But then you’re not sure who’s changed more between the two of you, so you don’t know who to blame.

Kazuhira steps away, the rhythmic pattern of his shuffling diminishing with each step. You stand alone on the balcony, and watch the orange sun sink down beneath the blue horizon.

 

* * *

 

_“Have you noticed how much time Boss spends on the medical platform?”_

_“I wonder what’s there. Some of it is still under construction. It’s blocked off to guys like us.”_

_“It’s not that woman, right?”_

_“That freakish sniper? Can’t be. She’s in the brig below, and I saw him go into one of the doors above…”_

_“Just once, I’d like to know what he’s doing in there.”_

 

* * *

 

“DD, stay.”

DD sits back, his head tilting. You’ve never let him follow you this far before, but you feel sorry she’s always on her lonesome with no one to visit her, so you think, maybe…

You open the door. Paz looks up from her book. At your behest she’d been given more comfortable clothes; somewhat selfishly, they cover the scar, too, so you don’t have to see the angry red V stitched into her skin. At first her features are pulled into a look of tight surprise before her warm smile relaxes her face, and she sets the book down to reach out a hand.

“A puppy! Here, here, puppy!”

DD stares at her inquisitively. He’s never really been babied, and the sound of a shrill, inviting voice is unfamiliar to him—but he pads forward still and gives her hand a few cautious sniffs before allowing her to get a few pets in.

Seconds later and his tail is wagging, Paz’s fingers are buried in the fur behind his ears, and in his excitement, he’d jumped up onto the bed and started licking her face. You let a small smile tug at the corner of your lip.

“He’s not a puppy, you know,” you tell her.

She shakes her head, laughter chiming from her mouth. “Don’t be silly, Snake. All dogs are puppies.”

This is a dog whose tongue has tasted the blood of other men, you think. This dog, this ‘puppy’, has sunk his teeth into the throats of men, has torn their flesh apart, killed them as they cried. This is a dog of war, and Paz is an angel of peace, and shouldn’t it be wrong to let an angel play with Cerberus?

But Paz is wiping puppy drool from her face and giggling and her features are so gentle and DD’s big heaving body is panting with excitement and you unclench the fist you hadn’t realized you’d been holding.

No, you think. This is fine.

 

* * *

 

Things are harder without Quiet. Kaz would scold you for hours if he knew, but you’d grown so used to having someone watch over your shoulder that sometimes you find yourself making amateur mistakes, slipping up in ways the legendary Big Boss should never. You knock someone out and forget to count the seconds, and he comes back awake before you know it, his gun cocked to your head while you’re still holding someone else. Other times you approach an outpost and realize belatedly that no one’s scouted it yet, that the positions of the enemies are still just pale red circles to you. And most of all?

You miss her humming.

Seems strange to have found comfort in that repetitive grey noise, but your skull feels hollow without the lulling _mmm-hm-hm-hmmm-mm-hmmm_ that became as natural to you as your own breathing, that covered and concealed the sounds of your heartbeat and the rushing of blood.

Your head is empty as you press the knife against the neck of the Soviet soldier. Where are your friends, speak, you don’t even remember what you’d said—but he’s talking, now, his trembling voice edged with hysteria.

“It’s you, isn’t it? Big Boss. They told me you were around, but who would believe it? They said you died when MSF went down.” He laughs, pink spit frothing at the corners of his lips. “But it can’t be you, can it? Because I don’t fear your knife.” His hand clasps around yours, knuckles white.

You don’t move. Don’t react. Your face stone. Not a single twitch. But your heart is thumping at a thousand knots.

“You haven’t killed anyone, have you? Have you ever killed anyone at all?” He looks up at you, his eyes wide and glistening. “They say you’re a demon, but I look into your eyes and I see something else.”

 _“Boss, what are you doing? Neutralize him!”_ crackles a voice in your ear, and in your moment of hesitation he yanks his grip towards his throat, and your knife sinks into his flesh. Blood leaks from his jugular, and wets your fingers in warm red.

 

* * *

 

“Snake, do you remember the monthly birthday party we held for Gecko and Armadillo?” Paz asks, lifting her hand to her mouth. She covers her lips in a sly gesture, the corners of her shining eyes lifting. “Miller was so funny that day.”

The names are familiar to you—for some reason the name ‘Armadillo’ invokes a giant silhouette, but also tickles your memory with something else, something thinner, like an old memorized factoid being dragged out from your frontal cortex—but you shake your head.

Paz frowns. “When did your memory become so poor?” She reaches out a hand to your face, her fingers extending towards the shrapnel buried in your forehead. “Is it because of this horn?”

You gently push her probing away: no touching. She frowns, pausing, before withdrawing. There’s a moment where it looks as though she wants to say something else, like she wants to question further, but you don’t have the answers, and you don’t want this sanctuary to become another hell. Somehow, she seems to understand—and instead goes back to telling her story: the laughter, the music pouring from the boombox, the cheap imported booze and food that wasn’t just hardtack and canned meat.

Gradually, as if recalling a dream, it begins to become familiar to you. Your eyes close. She’s still talking, her words helping to give the memory color and form, but at some point you aren’t quite listening anymore, at least not completely. Armadillo, yes—hadn’t he been Swan’s boyfriend, back at MSF? And the French wine, from ’72…

_You and the others, at the table littered with cigarette butts. Arms wrapped around each other, liquid sloshing in haphazardly grasped bottles, singing drunkenly along to ‘Carefree Highway’._

“Miller tried to shield me,” says Paz, her voice tinted with laughter. “But it didn’t work out. ‘C’mere and take a look at the REAL Kazuhira Miller!’—Do you remember that, Snake?”

 _Yes, you did. And if you thought really hard maybe you could even remember what his butt looked like from dead-on. Not to mention the disapproving glance of Big Boss behind him—_ hm? From the side, that was how you saw it, right? And he— _you_ —had grumbled something _and alcohol dribbled down your chin and you rubbed the back of your hand across bare skin_ —huh? No, it was a beard, wasn’t it? _But Miller, wasn’t he your—_

“Snake?”

The trance snaps. You flinch as if struck, your eye reopening again, gaze turned down to your trembling fingers. Paz leans closer, looking up at you with concern. “Is this upsetting you?”

“No.” Your voice is thin, whisper-dry. “Keep going.”

The metal in your head has never burned so hot before.

 

* * *

 

“Boss, about yesterday…”

You stop, one foot still hanging in the air, before you plant it down on the ground and twist your heels to regard the man behind you. Kaz’s brows and lips are wound tight together, his expression pinched; it’s his troubled face. You’ve seen it before.

“Won’t happen again,” you say, but he shakes his head.

“That wasn’t the first time.” He steps closer, shrinking the gap between the two of you. “Last week, you did the same thing. Ever since that fr—ever since _Quiet_ left, you—”

“ _Enough_.” It comes out as a snarl—you hadn’t meant it that way—but it stops him with a sharp inhale. You hadn’t meant it like that. _It wasn’t your voice._ “Kaz, I… that’s enough.”

“You think I’m scolding you because I’m angry?” Closer. Even closer. You can hear him breathing, smell the tinge of coffee on his exhalations. “Is that what you really think?”

 _Is that what I really think?_ What _do_ you really think? Why would Kaz want to scold you? He never did before. _Nine years ago_ —that Kazuhira, he never scolded you. _Did he?_ No, because you were equals, and you trusted him. He didn’t have to scold you, because he could suggest oh so gently _“Load it onto ZEKE.” “What?” “What else would we do with it? ZEKE is our deterrent. To protect ourselves from nuclear attack, we need a nuclear weapon ourselves. Of course, if you’re not on board, we could always dispose of it”_ and you would just _say yes_.

What changed? Is it you? Is it him?

Is it both?

“I’m doing this because I’m worried,” he tells you, and your world spins.

 

* * *

 

_“Kaz… What should I do?”_

_“Boss…?”_

_“Tell me… Tell me like you used to.”_

 

* * *

 

That night, you retire on the balcony where Kaz normally roosts and slump against the railing. You pull out a cigar and set it between your teeth, testing the texture of it before lighting it and then pushing out a plume of smoke into the dark sky.

The lights of Mother Base gild the tips and ridges of the waves in white, and you watch with your one eye the shimmering sea beneath. Paz had fallen into that water, hadn’t she? And yet she survived.

 _Because you_ —because _he_ got both bombs out, right? And you, calm, with enemy _blood on your gloved hands_ , held her down—

_“Keep her gut in!”_

—and watched— _she screamed, strained, her head turning left and right, teeth gritted, struggling, and you had put your hands inside—_ no, that was— _Not her shoulders. Inside her abdomen. Pushing past the peritoneum, moving aside her small intestines as much as you could without harming the mesentery. Some of it was already torn by penetrating trauma caused by the crude manner in which the bomb had been inserted. The internal bleeding was_ —how would Big Boss know about—

— _YOU HAD BURIED YOUR HANDS IN HER GUTS_ —

The cigar drops, too large and unwieldy for the shape formed by your lips. It rolls towards and off the edge of the platform. You bring your hands to your face and try to wipe the sweat accumulating over your brow, your cheeks, your hair.

Had your face ever been so lined before?

 

* * *

 

Their ashes are still stuck beneath your fingernails. A shining diamond is stitched to your armguard.

Kaz’s voice crackles over the radio, earnest and tired. “Boss… I don’t know how you do it.”

You place the rifle in your lap and consider possible modifications to make. But when your hands run down the cold metal you _’re back in the quarantine tent, surrounded by the humming of lonely men, strangled voices begging you not to do it, scratching at their necks and_

“I—… all I could do was obsess over revenge, doubting my comrades along the way. But even after all we accomplished, the phantom pain never let up. If anything, it just got worse.”

You put the gun away. DD tilts his head, a high-pitched whine emanating from his throat. You reach out and bury your fingers in his fur, scratch him under his chin and listen to the soliloquy of your _commander_ —

“But you understood that from the start, didn’t you? From the moment you opened your eyes at that hospital.”

 _Dhekelia. You and Him hiding under piles of bodies, lying still in blood and intravenous fluid._ These are your memories, aren’t they? _The doctor holding a mirror to your face._ Who else’s could they be? _Your swollen eye blinks slowly, eyelids squishing together, before your pupil focuses on the image in the glass. The face you see is—_

“You knew it wouldn’t go away, yet you’ve been fighting the pain and confronting your phantoms the whole time, knowing full well the battle would never end—not ’til the day you die.”

 _The_ se memories are—

“I respect that now, more than ever.”

**—MINE.**

“It’s an honor, and a privilege, Big Boss.”

 

* * *

 

The Skulls are watching.

Their glowing eyes, green, silent spectators of your nightfall visit. The lonely residents of the Quarantine Platform stand motionlessly in their cages, sentinels of nothing. You step past them as if they were only statues, your feet carrying you straight to the locked cage at the very edge.

A nondescript tarp lies inside. The security on this door is lighter than on the others, given the state of its resident. The lock was only placed after Kazuhira’s insistence.

You dig out the key from your pockets, holding it between the fingers of your shaking hand.

_“Flaming horse?”_

You insert the key into the lock and twist it, waiting for the click, before you push the door open, its hinges creaking low and guttural. Despite the lights placed around the platform, darkness obscures much of your vision, and you can’t make out the silhouette of the figure that must be lying beneath the plastic.

You inhale and crouch, pinching the corner of the tarp delicately.

_Ocelot had laughed._

And you tear the tarp away, letting it fly into the air and—

_“Boss. This isn’t science fiction.”_

—Empty.

_“We left Dhekelia chased by lightning and lead, not fire.”_

Not even ash.

 

* * *

 

The door is only a few feet away from the bed, but it feels like the space between Kazuhira Miller and Paz Ortega Andrade is a thousand miles at least. Perched at her usual spot, legs swinging under the bed, the girl lifts her head, her golden curls bouncing around her pinched expression, brows drawn together as she regards the man standing at the doorway.

Kaz’s breathing is so silent you can hardly hear it. Or perhaps he’s not breathing at all.

“Paz, it’s…” he starts to say, but her eyes widen and she throws the book aside, jumping out of the bed to run to him.

“Mr Miller?”

He stumbles, his back hitting the door. You want to reach out your arm, to place your hand on his shoulder, to support him, to hold him—but he’d wanted to do this alone, he said, and you force your limb down, watching, quietly, as he composes himself.

“Yes… it’s me,” he says in the softest voice you’ve ever heard him use. “I’m sorry I didn’t visit sooner.”

She looks up at him, her expression blank. And then—she _smiles_ , her face illuminated with the glow of her own radiance, she’s smiling so big and wide and then she throws her arms wide too and, “It’s okay. Do you want a hug?”

Kaz pauses. He’s silent. And then: a curt nod, just barely perceivable.

Paz wraps him in a hug, and his shoulders settle, his body relaxing, piece by piece, as if the layers of him are finally being shed away, even if only for just a short while. Slowly, cautiously, he lifts his own arm, and buries it in her hair.

“Peace Day really did come,” she whispers, and these are your memories.

 

* * *

 

_“Miller?”_

_Ocelot’s voice drops low._

_“Boss.”_

_Cadence steady and gentle._

_“Miller left weeks ago and never came back.”_

_Fog._

_Your head is full of mist._

_Human teeth and bones in your skull and near your heart._


	2. mine

Then, Ocelot tells you calmly, “2 + 2 = 5”, and suddenly it all just doesn’t really seem to matter anymore.

Because these are my memories. Our memories.

We’re Big Boss, remember?

**Author's Note:**

> find me on twitter as [sunieepo](http://twitter.com/sunieepo) and on tumblr, also as [sunieepo](http://sunieepo.tumblr.com). comments and kudos appreciated!


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